Remark.as - privacy-first, portable comments

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25

Thanks for the feedback, everyone. Please feel free to keep discussing, but just wanted to address some things.

First, from what I’ve personally seen on the service over the years (and as some have mentioned here), this probably isn’t a crucial feature for most people on the platform. Most people just want to get their thoughts out without hearing what others think. It’s a rare bit of peace and quiet on the web today that I’d really like to keep enabling, which is why no comments will remain the default.

Still, we’ll be moving Remark.as forward probably in the second quarter of this year. I wrote a post about what I’d like it to accomplish (it’s a bit long, so you can skip to the end for the summary), but it’s going to incorporate everyone’s feedback here, too, so I appreciate it!

This is very cool! Looks pretty mature, and I love the clean UI. But I really want to build Remark.as around a certain workflow, so I think it needs to be made that way from scratch. Still, I appreciate you mentioning this! Your system could be a great alternative for anyone who doesn’t find that Remark.as meets their needs.

Agreed – like I wrote in that blog post, I think this is one of the main problems to solve. Most commenting systems miss the mark.

Again, we are going to build Remark.as. But like you mention, we’re a writing platform – and I think that’s why many agree that comments aren’t crucial for everyone. Our focus is on writers, and comments end up taking most writers away from their real work.

And this isn’t not a priority – it’s just lower priority than features like email subscriptions and ePub exporting, which we have in development right now. I know people want this feature, but we can only do so much at any given time, so we have to decide the order in which to do things. It doesn’t mean Remark.as won’t happen :slight_smile:

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This. And, as you mention, any comment system needs to promote thoughtful, quiet conversation rather than bombardment of reactionary blurbing.

I’ve found it fascinating since my brain injury in 2002 how I shifted my understanding of email, without realizing it at first. Others with brain injury interact in support groups via email with very thoughtful dialogue, but folks I email outside that community use email mostly as “FYI,” not to be interacted with. As Facebook increased in pupularity, email support group participation dropped rapidly, except for a few who needed the simplicity of email.

I’m not sure what this says other than the platform can be well designed for thoughtful interaction yet it also requires people chooseing to interact well and may not know or remember how until they discover it. How to promote that discover, of the art of conversation?

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To make commenting more human , it needs to become conversation rather than commentary. Someone talking at you through a television or lonely comment on a blog isn’t natural and human; a conversation is. If you want to talk to an author, you should be able to do that directly — no public side is needed. Then, if your conversation turns out to be of interest or use to more people, you should be able to make it public, where it can stand as a work in itself.

Very nice view on comments…

:clap: :clap:t5::clap:t4::clap:t6:

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The most important feature for me would be able to disable it completely. I don’t want comments, I don’t like comments :slight_smile:. My dislike grew over the years of managing several blogging platforms with tons of spam. Also, it is a lot of work as blog owners are more or less “liable” over here (where that is true in lawyer terms, I do not know 100%. But you need to manage your comments and remove comments that would break a law if someone makes you aware of these comments. Total hassle :slightly_frowning_face:.

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30

As Remark.as in another product than Write.as it’s easy as to not use it. :star_struck:

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Haha. OK, let me re-phrase that: If its optional, WOOHOO, go for it :partying_face:.

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I love the idea of a comment system that is native and optional for write.as. The biggest feature that I’d want to see is the ability to import comments from social (whether it’s activity pub or otherwise). However, I don’t think that’s a game changer. Honestly, if comments looked like/worked like they do here, that would be pretty dope.

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33

Gab is doing some interesting things with comments. Not sure if it might provide any relevant ideas for Remark.as, but just sharing because it’s getting some buzz and had a decent take-up by users.

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I tested the federated comments between mastodon and Peertube it’s really interesting: the same discussion on different devices of the fediverse

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@matt Do you know this project:

It’s open source software using Go, and the code is on GitLab:

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36

I don’t understand the part about Comments being delivered by email? Am I missing something? Thanks.

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I’m thinking that in the future, readers who are subscribed via email will be able to reply to individual posts via email, and be able to comment on them that way.

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I like that capability. Are you saying email capability instead of a comment section? Or capability for both or either? Thanks.

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I’m thinking both, or either – giving you the option to accept responses at all, and the option to have any responses sent that way shown in your comment section.

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Wow, thank you, Matt. That sounds awesome.

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This may have been mentioned, I didn’t read 100% of the responses. But the ability to turn comments on by the post… sometimes you want input and sometimes you just want to speak your mind without others opinions… thoughts?

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I am very much interested in Remark.as available to install as own instance. Considering great experience provided by WriteFreely, I expect you guys can make Remark.as as one more clean, fast and smooth open source project.

Even though I got into fediverse this year, I already enjoy Mastodon, PeerTube and WriteFreely. While Mastodon is excellent Twitter alternative, I use WriteFreely as draft notebook for quick notes that some time in the future might become full featured posts on my heavyweight blog. It would be great to receive ActivityPub comments to WriteFreely posts!

While PeerTube has fediverse comments capability, my wish would be to have comments system to integrate with WriteFreely (and perhaps PeerTube too?) to have single comments lifecycle (moderation, user authentication, etc.).

If/when Snap.as goes public as open source project, it could also reuse Remark.as for it’s comment functionality.

Main driver for me to choose WriteFreely was aim to learn Go lang so I hope in a while I’ll be able to contribute and hopefully help with Snap.as and Remark.as if/when they become open source :slight_smile:

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Would this be something under the control of each individual user, or something, say, a WriteFreely instance admin could set instance-wide rules for? Asking because should I move toward setting up a WriteFreely community I would want to disallow comment anonymity, and certainly disallow being able to morph oneself between different single-use usernames, because that feature risks preventing me from being able to punish code of conduct violations site-wide.

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Great point. Again these are still just ideas for now. But either way, the version usable with WriteFreely would be configurable by the instance admin first, and then by the individual users. (And perhaps the ability for users to configure things themselves could be configurable by an instance admin.)

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45

I’d like to suggest another feature as well: the ability to add a custom action if a comment matches a given criteria (e.g. a regex match or any other text processing - maybe allow JavaScript?). Let’s say that I’d like to cold-bloodedly delete without previous verification any comments matching a given regex (like offensive words or phrases) or keep long comments (char count) on hold (hidden) until approval, because maybe I’d like to respond to them in another blog post instead of in a comment session.

Maybe I didn’t express myself well enough. It’s just an idea, though.

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